We are situated, historically and geopolitically, in a post-colonial, post-national and post-fordist Europe, where migration – as a constitutive feature of the European social space – highlights Europe’s ideological and constitutional limitations and challenges. The intensification of institutional restrictions and closures, as well as continuous policy gaps, reveal inability to encompass and accommodate migration at nation-state level; migrants’ claims to rights de facto challenge national sovereignty as the ideological/political foundation of citizenship rights. While migrants performatively engender the right to mobility and precarity, official policies are increasingly including selected categories of migrants as precarious workers denying them at the same time social rights and political participation. Post-national inclusion effectuated fro example through ad hoc regularizations, becomes equally – if not more problematic than exclusion.

The focus of the three national cases surveyed has been on: Romania as a predominantly migrant-sending society; Greece as a predominantly migrant-receiving society, and FYROM as in between a migrant-sending and a migrant-receiving society, most often represented as a transit space. more.. »

Ge.M.IC. will focus on the intersections between gender and migration in the context of intercultural education, a considerably controversial area of socio-cultural development Education is understood as one of the main apparatuses and sites through which gendered national (cultural, religious, linguistic, ethnic) identities and histories are constructed and reproduced. more.. »

Secularism, dominant majority religions of the receiving countries (such as Catholicism, Islam and Orthodox Christianity), and migration history affect the way in which women (and men) live their religiosity in the public and in the private sphere. The relationship between gender, religion and liberal secularism is particularly diverse and depends on the local context. more.. »

The research on mixed families in Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey has presented a rather gloomy picture of societies in all three countries, marked by the low levels of acceptance of otherness, sometimes latent and sometimes openly displayed racism and xenophobia, and widespread stereotypes and prejudices against the immigrants. On the personal level, there is a problem of (at least initial) rejection of the mixed family by the parents and relatives. more.. »

One of the main findings of the present research is that citizenship practices led by the migrant population are produced at multiple scales and involve multiple public spheres that cross national borders and renegotiate relations between their homes in origin and in destination. This suggests that citizenship practices exceed the limits and jurisdictions of the nation-state. more.. »

Separate treatment of illegal (labour) migration and trafficking is necessary. Namely, illegality and trafficking should not be conflated. In spite of that, and focusing on violence, which is related to migration, gender, and culture, one should take into account that illegal migrants and victims of trafficking share indeed increased vulnerability to violent exploitation. more.. »